I have been a Jane Austen fan for 30 years. So it is kind of funny to me that only recently have Jane and her novels become truly "hot." I could have predicted it. Austen's novels from so long ago are absolutely relevant today. She is the all time subject matter expert on social manners and situations, which is humorous since she and her books, and the movies made about her and her books, are now designated by people with no social manners at all as "awesome."

Wealth, incomes and economics play an important role in Austen's novels. It has been calculated that a pound in Jane Austen's time has the same value as almost forty pounds today. It's really clear why a banking benchmark is timeless.

I have read that brand new Jane Austen fans have developed a new way to live life. They simply ask themselves in every situation, "What would Jane do or say?" In this case, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that" . . . POWER6 benchmarks are awesome.

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SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respectivelogos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries allover the world.

Last month I was lucky enough to be able to spend a wonderful day at the New England Aquarium. By far, my favorite exhibit was the penguins. It's amazing to watch them swim around, eat fish, play, and nest - a truly "full penguin experience."

Which reminds me that this week we are celebrating Linux. And boy do we have some outstanding new POWER6 Linux benchmarks to talk about.

And if this great news wasn't enough, this week IBM also published another outstanding POWER6 TPC-C AIX benchmark. The 4-core IBM System p 570 achieved leadership performance with a 75% performance advantage over the nearest 4-core, the HP Integrity rx6600. (1)

All of this amazing news happened as Sun announced Niagara 2, the UltraSPARC T2, touting SPECcpu2006 "estimates." It's legal but it's like not going to the aquarium so that you can sit in a movie theater and watch Happy Feet.

Last week I read a great newspaper article about designing a house. The writer described finding the right neighborhood, architecting the ultimate living quarters, decorating each and every room, and analyzing what gardens look best around the pool. The article discussed how people spent up to 8 hours a day on all of these design decisions on top of their day jobs. The only problem I have with all this is that it isn't real.

You see, all of this was going on in Second Life.

Don't get me wrong. Virtual worlds are great for collaboration. Attending a meeting where you can be dressed to the nines and see everybody without getting out of your real pajamas is wonderful.

But marrying someone in Second Life while you are married to someone else in real life so that you can live together in a cool new mansion that is not real strikes me as a little strange. Again, sort of like Sun using SPEC estimates - where you don't have to worry about the real availability of a real system or real disclosures or even real results.

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SPEC and the SPEC benchmark names are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

Yesterday, Sun published a new SAP 2-tier SD result on the Sun SPARC Enterprise Model T2000. The Sun result achieved 68% less performance than the IBM System x3650. And of course, the top SAP SD 2-tier 8-core result is on the POWER6 IBM System p 570.(1)

The colored pencils and the shower caddy will have to wait for next time.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respectivelogos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries allover the world.

China has had a lot of business challenges lately. Between lead in toys, poison in pet food, and just today an article on blue-ear pig disease, it would be nice to have some good news.

So it was great to hear today that China now has a new IBM System p5-575 supercomputer cluster to work on weather models for the Olympics in Beijing. The Beijing Meteorological Bureau announced that it has acquired this IBM supercomputer to aid in weather forecasting and air-quality control.

The 80-node IBM System p5-575 delivers peak performance of 9.8 teraflops, ranking it among the ten fastest supercomputers in China, according to the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Good thing computers can also help in manufacturing and pandemics.

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So first The Washington Post makes fun of the candidate's "shirt." Then, The New York Times publishes the candidate's letters from college. It doesn't matter which party or which candidate you support. It's just downright embarrassing.

Remember that day last year you wore the ugly purple plaid button-down ? Remember that gushy, self-centered letter you wrote to your friend in college ? It's no fun when that stuff comes back to haunt you.

Which reminds me of just how embarrassing Sun's latest blog entry is. Within it an estimated SPECfp_rate2006 data point on a 2 chip, 4 cores/chip, 8-core system is directly compared to the IBM System p 570 POWER6 leadership result on a 1 chip, 2 cores/chip, 2-core system. (1)

How embarrassing for all of us who really try to compare audited, published and truly comparable benchmark results.

At 5AM this morning, I saw the lunar eclipse. It was beautiful. A crystal clear sky, clusters of stars, and the glowing moon, with just a bite taken out of it.

And looking at those clusters, I began to think of Linux clusters, and where they really shine.

The IBM® System x3755 server is an outstanding platform for high performance computing, particularly for Linux® clusters where clients value high performance, manageability, and optimal price/performance per watt. In new SPECcpu2006 measurements, the IBM System x3755 achieved leadership scores for a 4-socket x86 server on both benchmark suites, integer and floating point. (1)

After the sky grew too bright to see the moon, I was too excited to go back to sleep. So I went and checked my email . . .

************************************************(1) SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark on IBM x3755 – Dual-Core AMD Opteron Model 8224 SE Processor (3.2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache).SPECint2006 15.2, SPECint_rate2006 114, SPECfp2006 14.5, SPECfp_rate2006 99.6.Results are current as of August 28, 2007. The scores have been submitted to SPEC for review andwill be posted on their Web site upon successful completion of the review. View all published resultsat www.spec.org. Planned availability for the x3755 model using the dual-core AMD Opteron Processor Model 8224SE (3.2GHz, 2MB L2 cache) is October 5, 2007.

SPEC and the SPEC benchmark names are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.